Amazon Is Quietly Eliminating List Prices
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
For certain products, the pricing + shipping is not at all competitive (toiletries, for example).
In many other categories, there might be a product with a nominal price of, say, $10 offered by dozens of different merchants, at more or less every combination of price + shipping from $0.50 + $9.50 up to $10 + $0 imaginable. It's a huge waste of the consumer's time, you'd think they'd be better off either providing sensible pricing for a category, or not carrying it at all. Needless to say, it's nowhere near as much a go-to provider as it was 4-5 years ago.
I wish Jeff Bezos would try buying a travel adapter (among many other items I've tried to buy recently) and tell me that it's a customer friendly process: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atravel...
There are approximately 5 actually different adapters sold under maybe 50+ brands, and all the reviews are so padded with 5* free reviews, it's tough to know which ones are crap and which are good.
Reviews aren't as important for retailers like Wal-Mart that curate their products. But for a marketplace like Amazon, reviews are absolutely critical to prevent scams. I hope Amazon realizes the enormity of this issue and is working on it.
I believe Amazon should:
1. Fix the reviews. Disallow giving items for free or reduced prices in exchange for reviews. This may have worked originally for books, but any benefit received now is far out shadowed by the negatives. Alternatively, just limit it to 5 total free / reduced reviews per product to limit the negative effect. Police this policy heavily.
2. For the duplicate products (where one identical product is sold under 10 different brands, like in the travel adapter example above): Group the products together, and choose the brand like you might choose the color or size on a t-shirt. I recognize that there isn't a UPC numbering system that makes this easy - but there are probably only a few thousand items required to group together to make the buying process a lot easier for a large percentage of purchases.
Along with other ridiculous prices, like $40 for a standard tape measure.
Pricing can also be a direct result of a velocity + stock calculation. If we are running low on FBA stock and don't have a good supply for the item ATM, the system may use a not-so-great source price on the item to calculate what it will cost us to refill stock. Sometimes items move around, or we lose suppliers for items, which cause the system to adjust the price accordingly.
If you are searching from Amazon proper (not our store) for those items in question, it is very likely Amazon won't show you our listings on them because of the price delta.
I would note we definitely utilize customer feedback to constantly improve our system's accuracy.
Ah, same pattern for the Dewalt DW2166 45-Piece Screwdriving Set, your price $37 shipped, not than anyone's likely to wait a month for the earliest estimated delivery date, vs. 14.45 Prime from Amazon.
Ditto:
DEWALT DPG82-11 Concealer Clear Anti-Fog Dual Mold Safety Goggle
DEWALT DW1354 14-Piece Titanium Drill Bit Set
Klein Tools NCVT-2 Dual Range Non-Contact Voltage Tester
DEWALT DCB205-2 20V MAX XR 5.0Ah Lithium Ion Battery, 2-Pack (679 plus generious free shipping, vs. 150 Amazon)
DEWALT DCS387B 20-volt MAX Compact Reciprocating Saw with Tool
I just happened to have bought a house built in 1910 6 weeks ago, so I have a general sense of what these sorts of items go for, as well as this item I might get later after I move in:
Hakko 599B-02 Solder Tip Cleaning Wire and Holder
I'm finding it impossible to come up with innocent explanations for the combined set of facts listed above, when your entry eliminates comparison shopping.
Picking one of your examples, we have the primary URL: https://www.amazon.com/DEWALT-DW1354-14-Piece-Titanium-Drill...
Then we have our store's URL: https://www.amazon.com/DEWALT-DW1354-14-Piece-Titanium-Drill...
Clicking on https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0045PQ762/ref=dp_ol... results in a view of all merchants selling on this listing. We're on the second page of 3 pages (last page is empty). At $25.57 we are not the most expensive, nor the least expensive. The lowest listed price is $14.99 by Amazon themselves. They probably got a good deal on them.
As you note, there is little reason for someone to order that particular item from us, on that listing. The same can be said of "Home Plus Hardware" which is selling it for $33.71.
I would note that your final blaming statement appears to demand an explanation for something I said incorrectly. I'm not providing a blow by blow "explanation" here for our pricing, but I would point out that I didn't say we always had the best prices on all items. We don't.
I did, however, indicate that we tend to be able to find good listings using our algorithms. That's not to say we can always get good prices on the items we're selling. That's another problem to solve entirely!
But let's check several items at semi-random (I avoided things in the same Dewalt tools category area, and every single one was significantly more expensive; first is your listing, second is the general one:
https://www.amazon.com/Woods-2001-Photocell-Weatherproof-Mec...
https://www.amazon.com/Woods-2001-Photocell-Weatherproof-Mec...
https://www.amazon.com/Lasko-2264QM-20-Inch-Performance-Velo...
https://www.amazon.com/Lasko-2264QM-20-Inch-Performance-Velo...
https://www.amazon.com/GE12722-Z-Wave-Wireless-Lighting-Cont...
https://www.amazon.com/GE12722-Z-Wave-Wireless-Lighting-Cont...
https://www.amazon.com/Moen-DN8408CH-Preston-Inspirations-Ho...
https://www.amazon.com/Moen-DN8408CH-Preston-Inspirations-Ho...
https://www.amazon.com/Akro-Mils-10164-Plastic-Storage-Hardw...
https://www.amazon.com/Akro-Mils-10164-Plastic-Storage-Hardw...
Sorry, but this is just too many coincidences for me to swallow. How are you even still in business??? Any idea how can you convince me, bald assertions just aren't making it against hard data.
However, your explanation for why only the listing on your store are limited to you is correct, I should have checked another storefront, I withdraw that objection and apologize for not doing my homework.
People who are in dissonance ask questions that have no answer. I would respectfully ask that you refrain from making blaming statements and asking questions with no answers.
I actually wrote out a whole reply for you which put a double bind on your argument, but then I said "fuck it". I'd rather eat dinner with my wife.
To this day I'm amazed at how relatively badly the "Amazon Basics" usb cables worked.
In the UK store at least, a good portion of the ice machines sold appears to be the same design, but there are subtle and not so subtle differences, but many of the not-so-subtle differences are tweaks of the exterior plastic.
About 2/3 of them appears to have internals of the same broken design (plastic cam on the ice tray coupled with lack of a sensor to determine when it has rotated all the way back, causes it to twist and eventually crack), but it's not clear if all of the nearly identical versions are even from the same manufacturer.
Some of the non-broken ones are still clearly based on the same design too, but changing the plastic cam for metal and adding extra sensors.
(I learned this after my second one broke, and I dismantled it and looked through drawings and pictures before ordering my next one).
Any reason to think this isn't the intended function by the manufacturers. In my experience lots of products have really simply low cost changes that would make them last much longer (eg fill this 1cm^3 area of the injection mould instead of hollowing it) such that the product will fail after a year or so. Even my IKEA armchair has a beam where a 1 or 2cm extension on either end would give the chair much more strength - before seeing that I thought IKEA was good-but-cheap, now I see them as much closer to just cheap.
Is it backed up by numbers? As a customer, I agree with you, but our annoyance could be less important than all the customers that quickly pick some product they neeed as long as it got enough stars, without going much into the reviews.
1. I go to your link
2. "Oh cool, there's a lot of travel adapters"
3. Filter by free shipping
4 (optional). See the top 2 are Sponsored, which makes me less likely to trust them, so ignore them. [NOTE: This is similar behaviour to using ANY search engine]
5. Open the top 3 links (https://www.amazon.com/MX-UC1-Protector-Universal-Charger-Ad..., https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Worldwide-Universal-Converter..., https://www.amazon.com/Grounded-Universal-Schuko-Adapter-Ger...)
6. Dismiss #2 because it's twice the cost of the other ones and has lower reviews
7A. Pick #3 because it's a "best seller" - which means it has been vetted by other customers
7B. Pick #1 because it looks the nicest
Both have mostly good reviews with some bad ones, but hey it's a 7 dollar piece of plastic that tries to work in 150 different countries, it's not going to be perfect.
What is so customer unfriendly about this process?
Oh and by the way, this is a POWER user process who really wants to get the best one. A layperson could have just as easily just went straight for the "Best seller" and been satisfied.
This means Amazon is fine for brand name stuff (PS4), or low risk stuff (Travel Pillow, Book). But, for a huge range of things you really can't tell if something is low cost, or low quality.
I called customer support and wrote to the responsible regulatory body in Germany. This specific model is not available anymore. A dozen identical looking still are.
In the end I used one that is three times as expensive made by a reputable company.
That is the problem.
If I actually want the cheap stuff I can go to Aliexpress on my own and pay half the price.
1. Ask for referral from people your trust, like your friends.
2. Buy locally in a physical store with a good return policy.
3. Buy from brands you trust.
It used to be Walmart, now it's Amazon; people will impoverish their local economy to save 50 cents.
Things I bought recently:
1. A rake. I chose the 5$ more expensive one that looked more sturdy and was made in Canada (where I live) instead of China.
2. A old generation smartphone. I chose Motorola G because it's a well-known brand and it had good reviews when it launched, two years ago. It's also got one of the longest battery time.
3. Jeans. I bought Lois Jeans at a local store because it's the last barnd I know of that is still made in Quebec.
Buying is also a political action.
Even the cheapest cars sold in the last decade are remarkably durable and reliable.
I once bought a higher end item because I expected it to be good quality. Ended up being one of the poorest quality items I ever bought, replaced it with something that cost 1/4th the price and is better quality.
I have a $200 phone. $600 phones also exist but the $200 does everything l need it to do perfectly. The expensive option isn't better for my needs.
Which can start a fire, destroy a phone or laptop, etc. I think we need to take these things a bit more seriously. I usually just buy something from an US brick and mortar, at least then I know the UL tag is real and someone vetted this somewhere.
Heck, this problem even extends to usb cables. There's a google engineer who reviews USB-C cables after people started complaining about them damaging Nexus phones. I think you're being flippant about a real problem here. Unregulated Chinese manufacturers gaming the system with junk is not something we should be ignoring.
And will the insurance company say when they find out that the fire started from the junk metal-and-plastic piece you shoved into the socket?
Even if they don't know or care right now, they will in the future if (or when) it becomes a problem.
> There's a google engineer who reviews USB-C cables
There's that. We clearly need some third party testing these products. UL and CE tags receive little or no verification. The results of said testing was that the majority of cables could possibly damage your phone, if I recall correctly.
They are even shipped by Amazon. These products should never enter any western market. If a kid electrocutes himself thats going to be very bad news for Amazon.
Based on the kind of crazy dangerous shit that ends up on Amazon and stays on Amazon, I wonder what kinds of things they are catching and blocking from being sold?
The number of verticals of items I won't buy off Amazon has increased. Between spending a lot of time looking at the search results, ordering something that sucks, sometimes its easier, faster, and cheaper to go to Target.
It would dramatically increase the quality of their store and brand, and it benefits from economies of scale.
Assuming they pay $100 for an high quality review, then a $10 item would increase by only 1 cent if at least 10000 are sold, which seem reasonable conditions.
For categories with many very similar items, reviews should be cheaper since a standard review procedure could be designed and applied quickly, offsetting the lower sales per items.
http://gizmodo.com/jeff-bezos-if-you-have-a-problem-with-ama...
I say this because I heard through someone that works there that Jeff does read complains and will often forward it to a department head with "?" body content. At that point that manager drops everything to come up with an explanation for what happened. Can't confirm this, but the source was pretty solid.
I remember a recent article about Rain, Inc (I had one of their beautiful 2006 iMac stands) and how Amazon essentially cut their price in half offering the same product with an Amazon logo instead.
It probably doesn't make much difference if you're shopping for triple As for a remote control, but with larger cells I'm always slightly wary of rewraps.
I'll see if I can dig out an article about it if I remember when I'm off the train.
I assume there's similar issues with all large batteries.
In a nutshell... fake batteries on Amazon can harm people badly.
If you're not so lucky, it's from a back-alley micro-factory with no quality control and the cells can literally burst into flame (which has been the big issue with "hover boards" recently).
Today, particularly for US TV shows, there are usually lots of alternatives available from non-Amazon-but-kinda-from-Amazon sources long before anything official is released here. However, prices and availability shown vary almost by the minute and sometimes rather sharply, and even whether the discs will actually play in a UK region player often seems like a random result.
I've really been going off Amazon in recent years, particularly since they started trying to be all things to all people, using highly volatile pricing algorithms, and spamming upsell promotions all over their previously straightforward checkout process. Sadly, since they had also successfully killed off just about everyone selling physical media from bricks and mortar stores first, and since I prefer to actually own my media instead of renting it from some streaming service, there are few other suppliers left.
Competition has utterly failed in the movie and TV show market now, and I fear this will only get worse as more films and TV shows are locked into one proprietary library/streaming service or another as the only (legal) source and even the likes of Amazon can't supply real permanent copies.
Every seller insists it's "Genuine HP" in factory sealed cartons and...it's not. The same thing happens with pens. Cheap knock-offs, every time. Reading the reviews on Amazon is unhelpful, because the reviews are polluted with apparently deliberate misinformation. It's got to the point where I either order Apple chargers from Apple directly or go to one of their retail stores in person, and I always buy inkjet cartridges in person. (I don't like fires and I don't like clogged inkjet nozzles.)
Amazon is great for lots of things, but not small, easily counterfeited, safety critical items.
I ended up buying them for $30 in person at my local electronics store.
The sealed off from the world feeling is usually only useful when concentrating on a task and that is pretty rare.
In fact they already have: https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Performance-Alkaline-Bat...
Note these were all on sound card(s) where other speakers had worked fine... so one good experience, and three bad ones. They were pretty cheap, in that I didn't return them, but left an appropriate review in the end.
They were mainly gifted out (and later thrown in the trash) to friends at work, etc. I got mine so I could have a set of speakers to hear the occasional audio at work at the time... which worked great.. I got some of the same for a couple coworkers, and another set passed along when I'd upgraded my computer at one point.
I have M-Audio AV-40's speakers on my desktop at home, and Mackie CR3's on my spare... both are great sets of speakers I can't say good enough things about. Given it's a $10=15 pair vs over $100 ... I wasn't expecting huge sound from the Amazon speakers, that said, I've seen other speakers in that price range that worked far better.
I only use them for remotes, controllers, and the occasional flashlight, but they've worked very well.
I doubt Amazon would do this, because they probably consider these reviews to be barely on the good side of the line between fake and real, and higher ratings undoubtedly lead to more sales. Moreover, before the FCC rule change, this probably happened all the time but nobody disclosed it at all.
Sure you might have to wait for the slow boat from wherever your product came from, but the savings is almost always better than Amazon
Assume everything might be junk. Even some items from the best companies, i.e. I've been buying and will be buying more precision tools from Starrett lately, Made in the USA and all that jazz, and it shows. But when I went to buy a small metric open wrench set, the reviews indicated their's was anomalously subpar (so I went with another vendor with a good product, and then I got straight from Amazon Prime a mispacked Imperial set in a metric labeled baggie :-( Sometimes you can't win, although the return was painless (well, after I convert the image to a raster one, the normal shipping labels are the only thing that kills my heavy duty but old Brother printer, but not my father's much newer and cheaper one) since there's a UPS drop-off in walking distance.)
So, distrust and verify, and learn the particular patterns that signal relative trustworthiness, like 96% or better reputation for merchants (but if they don't do much business and are one of the few or only who sell the item, check the bad reviews because so many are self-evidently bogus), and of course shill reviews. And especially a fine tuned sense of "if it's too good to be true...."
Or take another example: pretty much all US market washing machines are shit, because the government pays the companies to make them worse and worse each year by using less energy (lower water temps, and I'll bet less agitation), Whirlpool, which only does appliances, paid no Federal corporate income taxes for at least 2 years because of this scam.
So when my 2007 not so bad GE washer had a $$$ expensive problem to fix (since to make it cheaper to manufacture, and a one level more reliable in the field, with a solenoid attached to a major part that you can't fix in the field without replacing everything), I checked out the competition, and Speed Queen's consumer line was highly spoken of.
Seems they bought an old Whirlpool? plant and rights to make an old model, which reading between the lines uses the old electro-mechanical cycle selectors/timers, which of course fail with some regularity.
But Amazon reviews saved me from a fatal flaw in their business model: if you need a major repair, e.g., due to a manufacturing defect (fairly rare) or shipping damage (it happens on big heavy items like this), you're SOL. They pay their network of third party repairmen a fixed rate by the incident, so if one of timers needs replacement they'll do it quickly and with a smile, if it's something serious they won't give you the time of day (so I spent maybe 1/3 of the cost of new Speed Queen on a repair by the local GE shop which my family has a 3 generation relationship with (my paternal grandparents actually sold them their first store front on Main Street, where they were selling newly hatched chickens and turkey, and it helped that the washing machine is of very good design and good build quality).
Which I can't blame them on, you don't make ends meet by working long hours at a loss, but let's just say that reviews like that make me a loyal Amazon customer, they've saved me enough money that I'm willing to pay them small premiums for the stuff I do buy from them, especially given how reliable that process is.
Also its possible to get a knockoff product that is sold and shipped by Amazon because Amazon allows their inventory from their supply chains to commingle with third party seller inventory.
I guess the problem with the "everything store" is that you can't possibly get your arms around "everything" to make the purchasing experience consistent. As Amazon has moved to become "more like eBay", the quality of product listings has suffered immensely. The information needed to make an informed decision on a large chunk of their products is just missing and the wild-west of seller provided products leads to knock-offs and clone products that are difficult to discern quality versus junk. On many of these products, user reviews (if there are any) don't help because they require more than a hobbyist/amateur to provide a useful review. The usual defense is "returns are easy", but because of Prime, I use Amazon as a first choice when something breaks down. I need that part today, but there's no retail store that sells it, so tomorrow will do. If I could wait a few days, I'd use a trusted supplier who carries only the higher quality.
My most recent horrible experience with this was looking for 608 bearings. 608s are the same bearings used in inline skates[0]. Searching for them, however, requires you to use a variety of terms since the inline skate bearings almost never indicate that they're 608s. The user reviews for the kind I need are worthless, as is the price (high-end bearings are often unsealed, but also overkill at sometimes upwards of $100 for a set of 16). 608s, thankfully, have a standard rating (ABEC) that many people know about (but few really understand how limited this rating is). ABEC ratings indicate the tolerances of the bearings, not the resistance, but it tends to equate that higher ABEC bearings have less resistance. That is, until you search for them on Amazon. The first time I purchased bearings, I went to the Industrial/Scientific category and grabbed a set of four ABEC9s that I supremely over-paid for. They rattled and vibrated when spinning ... these were not ABEC9 bearings despite the italicized labeling on the rim. I returned them and replaced them with a set of eight ABEC9 inline skate bearings that were priced at $3.00 shipped (I've not seen a price even close to that since)! These had a mess of reviews that had the pattern of "They spun fine when I installed them but then ceased up after a few uses", indicating that they were almost certainly not sealed bearings[1]. After testing the ones I received, I promptly purchased 15 more sets of 8 in hopes I'd never have to hunt down 608s again.
[0] I learned that the inline skate versions are a little easier to discern quality from since the reviewer can tell pretty quickly. Bad bearings ruin the experience very quickly.
[1] I usually avoid inline skate bearings. You can usually trust the reviews for bearings that are very well sealed. You can't trust any others (including ones that claim to be sealed but really aren't). Buyers of bearings for inline skates often don't know using unsealed bearings will last anywhere from minutes to hours of use on a city street with debris ripping through them. Using sealed bearings in 3D printers and similar devices is fine, but you need to make sure you buy very good bearings because adding lubrication is nearly impossible (taking them apart without launching parts everywhere or breaking some portion of the bearing is almost impossible).
Given the poor experience, I'm unlikely to buy any more Amazon branded products.
If you're searching for batteries or some such, the search is terrible. Far too many items that don't meet search criteria included, far too much reliance on their worthless star rating.
They're ok to buy a book, CD or a known brand item. For anything else it's too much of a lottery now, I spend my money elsewhere.
I have a problem with the independent kindle books, I like to support independent publishing but so many of them are unreadable due to poor formatting and spelling errors. I realize these are low margin but its still the Amazon/Kindle brand.
Having lost trust it is going to be near impossible to regain it. You mention the Amazon/Kindle brand - they don;t, from the way they are managing it, appear to care very much about it. I used to believe the bad ebook formatting was an early days teething issue, but years later it is still relatively common.
I am guessing that this is probably the result of doing data analytics and finding that sales increase by allowing these shady practices. But eroding your brand and making the site less useful to loyal customers will eventually catch up to you when dedicated customers leave and evangelize other services.
Please fix it!
The worst ones is when there's 4-5 unrelated products, and the same reviewers on all 5 of them all 5-star reviews.
It's getting pretty bad... I think they should remove the weight of all ratings for users that have spent less than $1k on Amazon, and those that haven't continued to spend at least $100 a year... there's enough people that do spend that much regularly to count those reviews as a higher weighting..
I'm not sure it really decreases the risk that much, maybe some. With stickerless commingled inventory a third party seller can easily mix their fakes in with the real products and those fakes can end up "sold and shipped by Amazon."
and stuff like this - http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-ope...
>German knife maker Wüsthof recently told its authorized distributors that come June 30, they can no longer store its products in Amazon's warehouses, because the manufacturer doesn't want the merchandise commingled with items from unauthorized third-party sellers, said Todd Myers, vice president of sales at Wüsthof-Trident of America Inc.
>Authorized Wüsthof distributors may still sell through Amazon, they just can't use its fulfillment service, meaning they have to ship purchases themselves to customers. Wüsthof itself stopped selling its knives directly to Amazon around two years ago, according to Mr. Myers.
Speaking as a third party merchant, they do a lot of stupid. Just go on any forum for Amazon sellers and read the stories people post, here's an example - http://www.orensmoneysaver.com/2016/03/amazon-and-mysterious...
>I sent in 14. 14 were received, 1 was lost and 1 was found. How many should have? 14. How many does Amazon say I should have? 11. How many units do I actually have? 9
> Now, to Amazon's credit, the first screenshot was taken a couple of days ago. The newest reconciliation correctly shows that I have 9 units but once again does not accurately reflect how they got to 9 when I sent in 14. Of course, I have no reimbursement for these units because they aren't lost according to the system.
Commingling items is actually optional for sellers. I commingle some select items in my inventory. Commingled inventory allows Amazon to ship faster (ship from the closest warehouse) so they benefit from it in a way but its pretty bad that there's no accountability when inventory is commingled, that doesn't seem to bother Amazon. I wonder how many people who get a counterfeit recognize it as such and complain? I would probably assume many people would just think it's just a crappy product.
They also don't offer the option to intercept returns before placing them back in your inventory. Intercepting returns is important to make sure the item is still in sellable condition. They will in theory tell you if an item isn't sellable but that often doesn't work out from what I heard, Amazon will put returned items that have been used back in your inventory as new and then dock you when you sell the item again (and it is inevitably returned again).
This is a mess because you see the product, seem everything fine until you want click the buy button and see after that you can't buy this items. Thanks Amazon, I'm using now only Ebay & AliExpress for crap Chinese things.
Perhaps this was the plan all along...
What better way to do market research than to pit tens of thousands of individual resellers and manufacturers against each other to determine demand and equilibrium prices of the end consumer?
Then you just private label it and cut out all the middlemen, and sell direct. There's no way they can now compete with you, because:
1. You're Amazon, so you have the brand behind your product
2. You're Amazon, so you have efficiencies of enormous scale (in both manufacturing and distribution)
3. You're Amazon, so you can actually kick them off the market and delete their listing for any bullshit reason you can put in your TOS
Now I just buy PC components from Scan. As for Amazon - I stick to the stuff that comes directly from their warehouses. Even the items that they handle distribution for can't be trusted anymore.
It is cheaper for me to buy floss refills at my local supermarket than it is to buy on amazon. WTF!
The crazy part is when I see reviews last year of a window fan where they say "the fan is made of cheap plastic but decent for $19.99" and this year, the same exact fan is listed as $39.99.
It's sad how everything that was good about amazon is slowly getting whittled away. But hey, at least the stock is at all time highs and bezos is making a killing.
I'm one of those who unknowingly bought a knock-off charger off of eBay (the price was low so I bought it). I can't believe that they could make such an exact copy (externally). From the outside it's indistinguishable from my original Apple charger.
I usually bulk order so stuff arrives on Saturday if they'd have a "worker friendly" shipping service that delivers after 18h I'd be all over that.
I'm annoyed by a lot of stuff including the fact that pretty much everything is "reduced price" and that you have to wade through 5* reviews for every product but at the end of the day they are a brand I trust to deliver my stuff on time and do the right thing when there's a problem with some shipment.
For a company that's supposed to be all about logistics, Amazon kind of sucks at logistics.
They are very good at logistics for me!
However, for some products, Amazon offers a "free next day delivery" service option. These services tend to be offloaded on sketchy "courier service" companies with names like A1 Courier Services, Lasership, Ontrac, Dynamex, etc. These carriers get generally awful reviews (as seen here: http://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon%20carrier%20feedback/) and you hear a lot of reports of missing packages, late deliveries, etc. I've only used this option once, the item did arrive, but it was at quite a late hour (10PM). Based on the reviews, I would not use this service again.
I still use Amazon a lot, but they have become way sketchier over time. Knockoff batteries are but one symptom of this.
And I get the impression that bad Prime service through the USPS has more widespread problems. Amazon sure looks like it need to put more work on making this level of their logistics work much more uniformly, but I suspect they already are.
That stopped when DHL started overloading their drivers or I don't know what happened there. I was unable to get my deliveries. Either they were left in the truck for the whole week or the guy send it back. Made up reasons why he couldn't deliver (even if he didn't try). The final event happened when I god a box that looked as if some animal chewed on it. There was a HD in there.
This as well as exclusives made me think. I started looking for good electronics shops in my city and found one. I went another way on my way home and visit a book store regularly now. Since there are still items I have to order online, I've found that other shops just waited for me to leave Amazon.
Since they are obviously on the way to slow destruction while the rest of the internet is moving on, I don't see a way back.
A "box that looked as if some animal chewed on it" ... I think we have a higher population of animals who can do this, clearly no excuse for Germany ^_^. Seriously, after carefully considering various alternative vendors for a wall air-conditioner I new for my new home given my various constraints, I ordered one from Amazon, and UPS wasn't gentle on the box, even lost on of the 4 packing straps I'm pretty sure. But no damage except to a small section of the heating exchange fins, which never make it 100% anyway however you procure them, and can be tediously combed out. I've never regretted a big ticket item purchase from Amazon like that.
Back to DHL: does not give an impression of a well run company given the USA and German datapoints; can anyone else fill in the gap in over there? I'd expect UPS to try.
The worst experience I've had was indeed with DHL, where they apparently loaded my parcel on to the truck every day for about two weeks, but never attempted delivery. Eventually I worked it out with the sender, and DHL returned the original parcel to them.
Otherwise, I get dozens of parcels from DHL per year without incident. Every company has horror stories, and I doubt they differ too much percentage-wise in terms of loss and damage.
I live in a big Germany city, so I hope that drone delivery hype becomes a thing one day.
As opposed to what it used to be... a company that sold stuff and who also happened to provide some IT services.
I've had a fantasy of opening up a convenience store with absurd list prices.
Candy bar, was $1,200, now only $1.29! Save over $1,100! 99+% off! Maybe have multiple numbers slashed down to get to the final price, etc.
Then when the person leaves the store with 5 items I'd say things like "You've saved $94,650 today!"
(But you might get away with it, if it's outrageous enough to be clearly a joke.)
But that's easy enough for retailers to work-around these days when they can ask suppliers for multiple UPCs for the same item
You can't do this for "bespoke" products which is where the UK law seems to most hit businesses - things like furniture which are specific to the retailer.
Of course the $1200 candy bar price is never the RRP :)
I took some pictures in Portland once of the most extraordinary version of this I had ever seen[1][2]. I thought they had taken it up as a high art, but a few months later, they genuinely went out of business.
Make sure to avoid the expensive store...
A product can be sold below this price, but not over it.
Restaurants get around this for something like mineral water by tacking on a "service charge" for opening the bottle and serving it to you in a glass.
An airport cafeteria tried to do the same but without the actual service - asked for Rs. 80 for a bottle with Rs. 20 price tag.
Some consumer went to court and the court fined the cafeteria some Rs. 10,000,000
Most certainly. The insidiousness of these disingenuous marketing tactics is that that work if if you're wise to them. It's manipulative and annoying. This sort of pervasive disrespect for user/customers/clients/etc... is what has rotted the advertising/marketing industry from the inside out.
I think consumers are getting savvier over all, and the list price is losing its effect.
It seems to work on enough people, though.
For all practical purposes, the list price on American e-commerce sites is a worthless bit of information on a product page. I don't think in somewhere around 20 years of purchasing things online and from catalogs I've ever paid anything close to list price and I've never felt like I got a "good deal" simply because the gap between list and actual was large. In fact, I'd probably be disinclined to purchase a product with too large a gap between list and actual, making the assumption that something must be horribly wrong if they're trying to get rid of the thing at such a steep discount.
Though I'm very glad this deceptive practice is being targeted, if only from the perspective of eliminating one more useless bit of noise from product pages (can we also filter out the two word reviews?), I'd imagine very few people[0] actually believe that price represents a realistic product price for 99% of products[1].
[0] In the US this is a ridiculously common practice with the worst offenders being auto dealers. They'll list MSRP along-side a nearly impossible to qualify-for manufacturer incentives (unless you're active military, employee of the brand, have the brand's credit card points maxed out, are a previous owner of the brand ... in one case I discovered the discounts couldn't actually be combined making the deal truly impossible)
[1] About the only time this is true is when the product provider has a minimum advertised price requiring an extra step to see the price only once the item is in your cart (somehow, that's a loop hole?). Or Apple products...
Not really. I think the customer bases are different enough that it's an apples and oranges comparison. Not only do you have a different type of customer on Amazon (people shopping for groceries, or carpentry tools or even computer parts and hygiene products. While on Nordstrom, you have people shopping for not clothing, but high-end clothing.) but the scale itself is on an entirely different level. Amazon has millions of people buying stuff from them every single day. The volume of traffic and orders on Amazon is like comparing the entire economy of the United States with that of Kobe, Japan.
Before this, it wasn't that there was a constant sale... prices went up and down wildly with whatever coupons or sale you could get to work...
It turns out that their customers really liked the up and down sales. They went back.
Honestly I think I will miss the video streaming service the most at this point
If you're in the UK, an alternative to Amazon for books is http://www.wordery.com
If I'm shopping for something on Amazon it takes basically zero time to look at what the price is on Costco, PC Part Picker, my local stores, etc. and be sure I'm getting the best deal. I'm not a compulsive shopper who just buys things instantly when I see them.
The 60 million+ of us that have bought into Amazon Prime are very unlikely to cross shop very often; we've happily locked ourselves into the Amazon ecosystem.
Walmart is eating Amazon's lunch now, and I'm laughing my ass off. Good job, Jeff Bezos, you just destroyed your company.
Prime pays for itself even without compulsively buying everything from Amazon right now. If they stop offering good deals as the original article suggests, that won't be true and my Prime subscription will be canceled.
Honestly, I, personally, don't understand Prime but I also don't buy very much stuff and don't find getting my stuff in two days compelling 99% of the time so I wouldn't spend even close to $100 on shipping. I very, very often buy my basics online (TP, paper towels, pet food, soap, etc.) but I just wait for a sale from any retailer to buy. Other than basics I rarely buy much else.
If Amazon are so comfortable they don't need to price compete, when can we expect another online department store to get big?
I'm not loyal, my £ will go to whoever sells textbooks and bike gear cheapest.